


Condemned [Snip]

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [33]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games), Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Disasters, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Plague, Rats, urban decay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25171759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Taylor goes for a walk in the plague-ridden ruins of Brockton Bay.
Relationships: Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver & Lily | Flechette | Foil, Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver & Rachel Lindt | Bitch | Hellhound
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [33]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 4
Kudos: 71





	Condemned [Snip]

Rain drizzled, fogging the air as it dropped from the vast curtain of grey, fat clouds. The occasional drop hit her, splashed against the lenses of her mask as she walked, but it wasn’t truly raining, not quite yet. Vapour hung in the air, slicked the exposed skin her jacket and mask didn’t cover, clung to her clothes and rooted its way in, leaving her slightly cold even despite it being July.

Her rats crawled after her, a hundred strong, a hundred viewports, a hundred little ways to hear, to feel paws scamper across the roughshod pavement. The streets were empty, the street lights flickering every few minutes, some not even turning on at all. Buildings sat in broken ruins, very few standing, and none at all completely undamaged. It was too close to the shoreline to have any structures that hadn’t taken a battering from Leviathan’s arrival.

The end of the street was, however, occupied. A crowd of people, maybe ten or fifteen, were crowded around a small packet of boxes, piled high enough that the masked teenage girl at the top of the pile was well out of their reach. Her rats weren’t close enough - people were justifiably skittish about rats nowadays, what with the plague, so she didn’t send any ahead to avoid spooking people - to hear anything, but their sight provided enough. Her name was Imp, as far as Taylor could remember; a recent trigger - getting her powers a month or so after she herself had - with invisibility of some kind.

Tugging on the metaphorical leash to her rats, she drew the swarm to a halt. A block of range gave her some wiggle room, but despite her reputation, she knew better than to walk anywhere with a visible crowd of rats. Drawing them away, she split the swarm into four, then each of those four into two, eight total. Her focus strained somewhat beneath it, she had better control moving as one larger mass, a herd, but this wasn’t enough to trouble her, it was just distracting, requiring some of her focus beyond simple mental commands. Ushering the rats away, she had them stick to the alleys, slip into the windows around abandoned buildings, told them to keep pace with her but to keep out of sight, and they listened.

They always did, really.

Boots splashing as they slipped into a muddy puddle, Taylor continued on her way, one hand slipping into one of the big pockets on her coat while the other brought her sleeve up, dragged it across the wet glass of her mask’s lenses, clearing it. The little clockwork mechanism adjusted, a quick series of clicks as the main function of the mask activated, highlighting people, even ones hidden behind solid surfaces. It had been one of the first things she’d made, one of the few pieces of tinkertech that didn’t fall apart on her the second it left her hands, that wasn’t so niche that it had no general use. She scanned her eyes over the crowd, the walls, and felt herself relax minutely when she picked up nobody else, not even a single lookout.

It wasn’t safe. The Undersiders were villains, whether or not they liked to pretend otherwise, and dealing with them was always somewhat unpleasant, especially after Rachel had left and joined the little community she’d carved out for herself, but despite all of that, it was _safer_ than it could’ve been, than it had been the last time she’d been introduced to one of their capes.

Her boot caught on another puddle, splashed water aimlessly onto already wet streets. This time she was close enough for the noise to be heard, for Imp’s head to snap around, the leering horned mask she wore focusing down on her. Taylor kept pace and simply stared back, undaunted.

“Scurry!” Imp crowed, voice gleeful. Some of the crowd stirred, she caught the pale, drawn face of one familiar woman in particular. Patricia, she thought her name was, an occupant of the bar. She didn’t care that she was here, not particularly, so long as Patricia wasn’t a plant of some kind anyway. “Glad you could make it!”

Taylor tilted her head askance, felt tangly curls catch against the apparatus of her mask, pull slightly on her scalp. That was a lie, she thought, not that she knew for sure, but the only reason she was here was that someone had snitched that Imp had been coming around recently, drawing a crowd, promising a safe space for even those evicted from other communities. She drew some of her rats closer, just in case, let about twenty spill out from beneath the broken cracks of a brownstone building just to her right, the crowd stirring more, an anxious tension settling into the air.

“You don’t mind us poaching, right?” Imp continued, relentless, voice too high to be of a girl older than her. She was just a child, a powerful child with connections to one of the few major powers left in Brockton, but a child nonetheless. “I mean, we just offer. It’s not like we _steal_ anyone.”

Urging the rats up, she felt their little claws catch on the fabric of her jacket as they worked their way up her body. She had thirteen total clinging to her at various places along her back, on her shoulders, little bundles of warmth that soothed the raw edge to her emotions ever-so-slightly, just enough to make her voice steady. “I don’t,” she said back, watched out of the corner of her eye as Patricia relaxed, something like relief working over her face. “But I wanted to make sure nothing untoward was going on.”

That was part of the game with capes, the theatrics, playing around words. Even with Brockton quarantined, even with Bonesaw’s plague killing close to half the total population of the city in two months, even with the constant death and the threat of weepers and the suffocating feeling of being a bird in a cage while people watched from the outside, of being trapped, she still had to play her part. She didn’t want to, she didn’t want to do most of this, but then she had people to protect now, a place to live; her way of life had to change, despite her resistance to it.

“Oh?” Imp led on, sounding mirthful even as the rain started to pick up, came as physical droplets instead of a thin misting of vapour, rattling like drums against the nearby buildings, against the surface of her coat, soaking it through. “You think little old me would do something _naughty?_ ”

She had no response for that, so she remained silent.

Imp twitched, faltering. “You’re no fun,” she finally decided, head swivelling about. “Rain’s fuckin’ picking up too, ugh. Whatever, you lot heard my offer, I got _deets_ to dish out with our lovely little rat lady over there. So, fuckin’ shoo or whatever, you know where to go if you wanna go.”

The crowd pulled away, the low mutter of conversation picking up as people started to make their way back to their communities. Three people made their way back to the bar, Patricia included, who smiled a plastic, false smile her way when she passed, waving stiffly with her fingers, terror written into the creases along her face, the gaunt jut of her cheekbones. Maybe she hadn’t been getting enough food, she’d have to look into that.

Imp hopped down from box to box, the entire packet teetering uncomfortably as she did. Each hop was met with the loud bang of her feet meeting wood, a wet clap as the force of her landing sent droplets of water flying into the air. “You are one tough bitch to find,” Imp complained, nearly slipping as she landed on the second to last box, her heel squeaking across water-soaked metal. “I mean, we could go to the bar, but you don’t seem inclined towards considering taking us in or whatever.”

Well, she was right about that much. Had Imp or Tattletale or Grue or even Regent showed up at her bar, she would’ve told them to leave after setting up a meeting. Despite the bar getting enough foot traffic, she didn’t let capes come in when in costume, it was too much of a risk, too easy to let a dangerous element into a place that needed to be protected.

Dropping down to the concrete, Imp let out a little huff. “Quiet today, huh?”

Talking had been hard since Leviathan, since she’d found her dad dead and buried beneath the shambles of their home after crawling her way out of that shelter. She just inclined her head, pushing the thoughts to the back of her focus, away from her immediate concerns. Grief could come later, she’d been putting it off for months now, what was one more?

“So, look,” Imp began, striding forward and threading her fingers together in front of her. “Boss of mine wants some information, we’re willing to shell out some of our own. You interested?”

She didn’t hesitate. “No.”

Imp paused. “Why?”

“You don’t have anything I consider of value,” Taylor replied easily, her voice level, flat, empty. It hadn’t taken much to start speaking that way, the real effort had come in sounding like anything _but_ that. She’d considered doing it to make sure she didn’t sound like Scurry when she was in her civilian identity, but then she hadn’t _had_ a civilian identity since she’d found the bar, since she’d made it her home. Being Scurry, being a _cape_ had been full-time since the first few people had found their way to her, had asked for a place to stay, for shelter.

“So you don’t want to know about the other members of your fuckin’, weird power thing, do you?”

She felt herself freeze, stiffen.

“‘Cos,” Imp continued, voice almost lurid in how smug it was. “Boss-lady’s got some fuckin’ good intel on that Hocus bitch and Journeyman.”

The cluster, then. Information was scarce in Brockton, the internet was spotty at the best of times and actual information handed over by those upholding the quarantine around the city was limited. She’d learned some language, cluster powers, myriad expressions, minor powers and major ones, but nothing concrete, only enough to guess, to point herself in a direction as to why she had four powers instead of one.

The information was valuable though, that much was true. Hocus she didn’t care much about, she knew enough, but Journeyman? That was more important. He was, as far as she could tell, the Tinker of the cluster, he’d only been seen a few times, hiding away and only appearing to make forays into junkyards to try to get a hold of scrap. He was an issue, a threat, a Tinker who was hiding away and building up to something—something worse.

Her reluctance wavered, loosened. “What information?” Taylor intoned, inflection blank, not even able to put anything close to a question in her voice.

“Naw, I’ll ask after,” Imp deflected, just as quick. “Do you want the fuckin’ details or not? ‘Cos the rat thing’s kinda starting to fuckin creep me out.”

Her focus reoriented, the vast panoramic view she had of Imp given context. Rats hung, chittered, a silent warning as they peeked from gaps in the buildings around them, beady eyes staring down at Imp, wholly focused on her presence, on the way she made her anxiety spike. She reached out to them through her connection, felt their own anxiety, soothed them slightly with her presence. It wasn’t quite controlling their emotions, but if she exerted more influence, told them to do things, they always calmed, and despite her lapse in attention, she could already feel them begin to settle.

“Still fuckin’ creepy,” came the mutter, voiced like a petulant child.

Tilting her head to one side, the situation didn’t really need that much deliberation. She had to know. “Alright.”

“Ah, bitchin’. Right, so, we got the fuckin info on Hocus finally. She’s stickin’ ‘round, boss says, got her parents out of dodge but stuck around ‘cos she felt indebted, tied to her powers. Boss thinks she’s a kid of a cape, second genner or something?”

Taylor really doubted it, but then odder things had happened.

“We tried to recruit Journeyman,” Imp continued, not even a bit contrite. Taylor felt herself bristle unconsciously, felt the rat beside her face clatter its teeth together in an unvoiced protest. “Chill th’fuck out, fuckin’ rodent. He turned us down, and then tried to kill Regent, so we decided against it and let him go on his way. Still, last sight of him was near the Graveyard.”

Why would he be near there? Taylor didn’t know much about him, _nobody did_. He’d triggered alongside them, sure, he’d been there for what happened in the shelter, the chaos, the rush of bodies and people and the fallout of all of that, but nobody really knew where he was from. He had a Texan accent, thick and surly, he was an outsider, unwelcome, and now he was hanging around the Graveyard? Around the beached husks of boats Leviathan had dragged in with his waves, the place where they’d herded the early plague victims, where they’d been left to devolve into Weepers?

“Stop it with the fuckin’ chittering!” Imp bellowed, sounding panicked. “It’s fucking _worrying as shit!_ ”

Blinking, Taylor strangled her connection down, forced the rats into compliance. She had to work on keeping her tells out of them when they were in public. She took in a breath, felt her chest rise, then fall as it pushed out through her lips, catching on the metal of her mask. She had to be calm, had to feel the same way she spoke, she acted, had to be as blank and flat as her voice was. “I apologize,” she said, not feeling particularly truthful about it.

“You don’t sound it, but I fuckin’ get it. Whatever. Now, for my info, alright?”

Taylor inclined her head.

“How’s Bitch doing?”

She paused, tilted her head a bit more, felt a rat rub one itchy whiskered cheek against the space just where the eyehole on her mask was. “Is that all?”

Imp shrugged. “Boss lady wants what the boss lady wants. The fuck should I question it?”

Well, at least the information was relatively cost-free. “She’s doing fine,” Taylor said slowly, working the words out of her mouth with an ease that hadn’t come to her even minutes ago. She felt weightless, calmer, the tension bleeding out of her and into the ground. “She’s been teaching some of the children how to handle dogs, apparently it’s helped cut back on tensions between kids.”

“Bitch’s a caretaker?” Whether Imp meant that literally - Rachel being a caretaker - or used bitch to mean a derogative, Taylor didn’t know, but it could’ve gone either way. “You’re not lying, right?”

Her lips turned down behind her mask. “I don’t lie.”

Imp brought her hands up, palms forward, and if not for the mask, Taylor might’ve said she seemed a bit sheepish. “Alright, alright, yeesh. You don’t lie, fine.”

“Is that all?” Taylor repeated, trying to find the trap.

Imp just shrugged, a jerky jog of her shoulders. “That’s all I was _told_ to ask, sure.”

“Then I’m going,” she replied, mentally drawing on her rats, pulling them in, coaxing them out of buildings and onto the streets, their little bodies swarming like a small ocean. She saw Imp cringe bodily, physically curling into herself, her posture thick with palpable discomfort. “I have things to do.” She wasn’t lying.

“Ah, uh, fuck, jesus fuckin’... rats. You had a lot of them.”

Stepping back, Taylor turned away, keeping a few eyes on Imp regardless. “I always do.”

“I was gonna ask if I could tag along for your patrol but uh, on _second_ thought,” Imp started, voice quavering. “I think I’ll just really fucking not. You have a nice day, you creepy pied piper.”

Turning back, Taylor blinked. She... someone had been there, right? She had been in a conversation but—no, that wasn’t right. There was nobody here, not that she could remember. Maybe the rain was getting to her, maybe it was the isolation, maybe it was a bit of both. Shaking the thoughts free from her head, she focused her eyes back on the road, pulled up her mental checklist, and crossed out ‘check on the crowd of people’. 

She had things to do, there was no time to get caught up in her own head.

* * *

It was pouring by the time she made her way to the Protectorate Safe Zone. It wasn’t terribly obvious that there was a quarantine in the other parts of the city, if you got close to the center enough, even with the walls being easily twenty feet in some places, you couldn’t actually see them from beyond the inner-city buildings. The PSZ was the major contrast to that, a heavily-secured location where all the tools being used to trap everyone inside with a tinkertech plague came to light.

The PSZ was defined primarily by its walls. Not as tall as the ones surrounding the city, no, but at least eight feet tall and made from metal and concrete, heavily reinforced. The PRT’s logo had been stencilled across it in various places, a drippy black spray paint that leaked like tears down little cracks in the surface, turned slightly jagged from the pitted texture of the concrete. It was, in addition to that, among the few places where the tinkertech being used to keep them inside was deployed; the entrance to the PSZ framed by what had come to be called a ‘wall of light’; a pair of tesla coil-like instruments which sparked wildly with electricity. If anyone tried to pass between the two live electrical sources, whatever tinkertech kept the thing running would kick into gear and immediately turn the person in question into ash. It was built to contain rats, or at least that’s what they’d said, but had long since taken on a secondary use to cut off important parts of the city to those who didn’t live in the PSZ.

The next and more obvious example was the tallboys, or the stilt walkers. They were tall, at least twenty feet, clockwork automatons equipped with searchlights and basic weaponry. They patrolled the area, the creak of their steps more than familiar after months of being around them. They had basic programming, and the bulk majority of the tallboys were mostly located outside of the wall, stationed to ensure if anyone did flee the quarantine without going through the legal procedures to do so, they wouldn’t make it very far. Again, another piece of tech claimed to be used for containing the plague, to stop it from spreading outside of Brockton, Bonesaw’s last hurrah after she had died, but looking up at the one just beside her, trundling along in its wobbly, disquieting gait, Taylor wasn’t so sure about that.

Turning away from the automaton, she cast her stare skyward, towards the PRT HQ, or at least what was left of it. The top four floors had been stripped away by Leviathan, glass and metal siding peeled off, leaving the scaffolding of the building bare. At some point, someone had stretched large plastic tarps over the gaps, but whenever the wind pulled against it, she could just barely see the metal pillars peek out from behind it, glistening wetly. How much more of the building was damaged wasn’t clear, it looked fine from the outside, but that was no real indication of anything nowadays, if she was being honest with herself.

A long electronic creak bellowed out from the interior of the perimeter, the same sound they used just before their announcements. The wall of light in front of her flickered, electricity dimming before winking out entirely. Tucking both hands into her jacket’s pockets, brushing her fingers over one of her rats, Taylor squared her shoulders and stepped forward, keeping her face blank and empty despite the fact that she knew that nobody could see it.

The second she passed by the wall of light, that same noise rattled out, the dull creak and pop of electricity coursing back into the wall of light ringing in her ears. One of the rats she’d left out just beyond the concrete walls easily caught sight of the electricity returning, as it had the eight other times she’d come here.

Tinkertech aside, the interior of the PSZ was not that unpleasant. It had that same sort of wet and mire look of everything else, soil too soaked with water, plants plump and drowned, but the fact that they had grass to begin with set it apart. It was a circular area, a perimeter that surrounded the greater PRT HQ, with a long concrete path that led from the sole entrance into the PSZ all the way up to the front doors of the PRT HQ, where she could already spot the stationed guards, assault rifles clutched in padded-gloved hands, their faces lost behind security helmets.

Drawing to a halt in the middle of the path, keeping the requisite twenty-or-so feet between herself and the front guards, Taylor waited.

Either they had been expecting her or were quick on the uptake, as merely a handful of seconds later the front doors were thrown open, Glory Girl accompanied by Vista and Flechette walking down the concrete steps leading up to the front entrance. Glory Girl had a plastic bag in one hand, thick and see-through, showing off the pile of MREs packed away inside of it. Just at a glance, even with the distance between herself and the bag, she was relatively sure it would last them the rest of the week at least, if not more.

Flechette pulled away from the group, jogged ahead after saying something to Glory Girl that Taylor didn’t pick up. “Scurry!” She called out, a hint of warmth in her voice. They’d spoken before, not enough to be friends or even really _acquaintances_ , but Flechette had been one of the first Wards to look past the rats she controlled to actually try to talk to her. Others had come after her, of course, she was on good enough terms with Aegis, who had only recently healed enough to be allowed back on patrol, and she’d made small talk with Vista before, but Flechette was the only person who had ever really _tried_. “It’s good to see you! Any news?”

Taylor pitched her shoulders into a smooth roll, shrugging in a way that hopefully hid the tension she very truly felt, being caged away like this. Yes, she could escape at a moment’s notice, she already had a line of sight spot set up to do so, she just really hoped she wouldn’t have to. “A few kids got into a scrape,” she finally admitted, her voice quiet over the dull roar of the pouring rain. “They’ve calmed down now, but one of them has an inflamed knee. We’ve been looking for some antibiotics that aren’t expired.”

Flechette frowned, lips pulled sharply down as she staggered into a halt just a few feet away. Her hands were carefully folded behind her back, chest pressed forward, looking all the world like a proper hero. “That’s unfortunate, we don’t have any medical supplies to share, though. Not today, supplies have been... scarce.”

Ah, yeah. That was the thing about Brockton Bay, in all honesty, even Taylor could see that the place probably wasn’t going to bounce back from Leviathan and the plague. Still, despite that, she would’ve preferred if the politicians overseeing Brockton’s continued wellbeing hadn’t vocalized said thoughts on national television. It had been what caused the fight to begin with, one kid agreeing while the other didn’t, which had escalated into a full-on brawl.

She was glad that her mask was on, it hid the scowl. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she replied carefully, hoping the intent got across, and if the way Flechette’s face cramped slightly, a knowing twist to her lips, it had.

“You guys still hosting thirty people all told?” Glory Girl cut in, the steady tread of her shoes against concrete catching her focus. She raised the bag, plastic gripped tightly in one fist to the point where her knuckles had gone white. She was probably still reeling from the fact that everyone besides her had taken the chance to leave the city with Panacea, who had agreed to help with the cure so long as her family got a free exit. Or at least that was the rumour, anyway.

Pushing away the thoughts, Taylor inclined her head. “Thirty,” she echoed.

Glory Girl, still maskless despite her status as a Ward, showed nothing on her face in response to that. Wordlessly, she stepped forward a few more paces and held the bag out, which Taylor took near its bottom, the plastic crinkling as Glory Girl let go, all of the weight dropping down onto her wrist. Carefully, she pulled the bag in, slipping her other hand into the gap meant to be used as a handle, her fingers tightening down around it. She could cross another task off the list: get supplies.

It wasn’t perfect, the bag was literally just full of rations, but they had their own source of water that hadn’t been contaminated due to Leviathan and outside of some vitamins and medical supplies, it was all they needed. “Thank you,” she said, belatedly.

Something in Glory Girl’s posture relaxed, loosened. A smile graced her face, slightly drawn and harried, but nevertheless genuine. “I hope this helps,” she replied.

Taylor hefted the bag a bit, felt the weight. “It will.”

Turning, she made it all of one step before a hand coaxed itself around her bicep. She froze, one of the few rats she had on person instinctively scurrying its way up her spine, peeking its little head out from beneath the collar of her jacket, eyes blinking as it adjusted to the light. Flechette had stopped her, gloved hand closed around her arm, face pinched and awkward. Behind her, Glory Girl’s eyes had rolled up into her head in the universal sign of exasperation, while Vista was staring off into the middle distance, looking bored.

“Uhm,” Flechette staggered, sounding a bit unsure of herself. She watched as her eyes flicked from her to the rat, though she didn’t look at the rat with disgust. Possibly because it was an albino rat, among some of the few rats she kept out of combat, kept as pets. Her name was Creta. “So, uh, I was... _wondering_. Uh. If, you’d, uhm, would like to meet again. After a patrol.”

Taylor blinked, slow and languid, working that sentence through her head. “Not today,” she finally decided.

“Tomorrow?” Flechette hedged, sounding careful.

Tomorrow was one of her rest days, though she still did a pretty small patrol. “Sure. We can meet at the bar at two?”

A smile, somewhat shaky, flickered onto Flechette’s face before it was all schooled back into something close to neutrality. “Sure.”

“By the way,” Vista finally interjected, a slow drawl that sounded about as empty as Taylor’s. “The Protectorate would like to remind you that, while we understand you are running a community, you shouldn’t become attached to your current residence. In the event that the quarantine is lifted, you will be expected to vacate the premises.”

Right. They always sent her away with that warning, and at this point she was pretty sure people drew lots to see who had to be the one to say it. It was Protectorate policy that people who held territory in a city were villains, with them as the exception of course, and she could admittedly see some of the logic. Despite that, it still made her bristle, made her shoulders square and her spine straighten, each time they deigned to remind her.

Flechette’s hand jumped off of her bicep, her head snapping around to stare mulishly at Vista, who just stared back with a bored, hollow expression. Gallant, Kid Win’s, and Soph— _Shadow Stalker_ ’s death had hit her hard, apparently, harder than anyone. Sometimes she wished she hadn’t read the memorial stone, hadn’t looked over it just to be sure nobody she knew had been on it.

“I’m aware,” Taylor said, working to keep her voice level. “May I go?”

She saw Flechette jerk with the eyes of her rat, a guilty look flashing up to replace the angry one. “Right!” Flechette squeaked out, running a hand through her hair. “Right, right. Yeah, safe travels, Scurry.”

* * *

The hill she buried her father on was a muddy one. It was steep, almost a sheer cliff of wet soil with trees toppled over, left half-submerged in the muck. Grass didn’t grow, plants were drowned out or buried as rain dredged canyons into the surface, soaked down into the roots. It was a mess nowadays, hadn’t been when she’d first brought him here, the days after Leviathan had been dry and clear-skied, but then the rainy season had come and just refused to leave, even halfway into July.

The area was, by normal means, completely impossible to traverse. The mud was knee-thick in some places, the hill was steep, the rain and wind pulled you down, dragged you further into the earth. But, then, she wasn’t normal, was she? She reached out to that void, felt her awareness of it bloom, that sense of having a well of power, a pocket where vapour filled, filling her focus. She narrowed her eyes, imagined herself on the top of the hill from where she stood near its bottom, felt the vapour burn, nearly a quarter of it used up to simply move herself to the top of a hill. At least she wasn’t overdrawing, wasn’t making herself sick and cutting off her only escape route because she was feeling sentimental.

Using the power felt odd, felt oily. She knew what it looked like, saw herself with her own rats as her body flickered, glossy shadows shimmering into existence around her body, blurring her from sight, only to then reconsolidate at the hill’s apex, her feet sinking into the muck. Her father’s headstone was at the top, and she climbed the last few paces to it without much trouble. The rain fell in sheets, an endless deluge, soaking into her coat, her body, weighing everything down.

Lowering herself into a crouch, Taylor swiped her gloved hand across the headstone, buffed away the mud that had splattered across its surface. It wasn’t professionally made, little more than a flat piece of stone half-buried in the ground, ‘Danny Hebert, loved and dearly missed’ carved into the surface with a chisel she’d found in the rubble of their home. She’d found him there, body half-buried beneath timber and wood, the house had collapsed in on itself. He’d gone back for some reason, for a reason she’d never really figure out, he’d told her he’d make it back in time, but he, as evidenced, hadn’t.

The grief had long turned to aching numbness, months later. It had been raw at the start, crawling in her throat, urging her to scream and shout and drag nails across anything she could get her hands on. The hole she’d buried him in had been half made from that anger, rats gnawing and digging at the earth until she’d seen the depression, decided it would be easier to bury him here than anywhere else. She’d been wrong, of course, it was actually really difficult to dig a hole, but the rats had made it easier and after that day had been over her father had been buried and she had passed out on the lump of earth, waking up the next morning cold, aching, and tired.

She had been tired for a long time, now.

Setting the plastic bag of rations down beside the headstone, Taylor beckoned a few of her rats out from inside of her jacket. Creta came first, the rose she’d found held firmly in her little maw, Titania next, a single dried sunflower hauled out from the collar of her jacket with a few ardent tugs. Finally, Oak, the oldest of the three rats she’d brought herself to name, to rely on, even if they were entirely under her thrall, dragged out a mishmash of wildflowers, pretty little things that hadn’t been drowned by the atrocious weather.

Gathering the flowers into one hand, Taylor laid them down right in front of the headstone. They’d be buried in a day, she knew, covered in mud or dragged down the hill by the rain, but something in her settled, stopped screaming so loudly in her head when she did this. It was ritualistic, pointless, she could be doing other things, getting the supplies back earlier, relying on Rachel less if she just... didn’t do this every couple of weeks, didn’t take some time for herself to breathe, to come to her dad’s tombstone and leave some pointless flowers.

But like a ritual, she still did. Whenever she found the time, she’d find a rose to represent her mother and two other flowers that represented her or something she wanted. A sunflower for the future, for the rain hopefully stopping, and the wildflowers to represent her, if only because she found that she liked them, found that their frivolous nature, their prettiness, was appealing despite the world around her, despite everything trying to drown her.

Leaning forward, Taylor rested her forehead against the top of her father’s headstone, the metal of her mask creaking as she pressed down hard, the pain welcomed.

“Hey, Dad.”

* * *

It was dark by the time she arrived back at the bar. The Hound Pits Pub stood tall, four stories of brick, the only thing standing in a long street of broken, half-collapsed buildings. It had originally been a skinhead bar, seeing as it was relatively deep into E88 territory, but then the E88 existed in name only nowadays and she had made it hers. She’d originally wondered how a bar that wasn’t particularly popular had managed to keep itself afloat, had originally thought it was to launder money, but then they’d finally cracked the lock off of the basement and found a massive kennel. Whether the bar was a front for the dogfighting ring below, or if the dogfighting ring had just been how the bar remained afloat, well, it didn’t matter much anymore.

Twisting the knob, Taylor pulled the door open, the low roar of conversation dying out. She was soaked to the bone, water dripping off of her coat and onto the polished floor beneath her feet. Children huddled around the booths, some of which had been retrofitted into sleeping areas, pillows piled up for those still small enough that if they laid down their legs wouldn’t stick out from beyond the red-leather seats. The tiles below her feet, despite being polished, were old and worn down, with brown abrasions popping up.

She was home.

Turning back around, her fingers found the door and she pushed it shut. The conversation slowly built back up around her, people returning to normal, and she listened to some of it as she twisted the lock shut before moving on to the deadbolts, flicking them closed as well. It wouldn’t stop a Brute, and the windows wouldn’t stop anyone who tried to get in through other means, but locking everything up was mostly to calm her head, to get her to soothe.

The steady clatter of boots drew her attention back away from the door, towards Rachel. She was tall, broad-shouldered and very classically butch, with her hair shorn almost to fuzz, blonde hair forming tiny curls that stuck to her damp forehead. Her face was twisted a bit, not quite anger, but annoyance. “Need more dog food,” she said, spine straightening, fingers tightening at her sides.

She was too tired for this. “Alright.”

Rachel nodded, as though she’d expected as much, before turning back towards the bar. With a population of mostly kids, Rachel had been the only person Taylor had really trusted to man the bar. In part, it was because she was a cape, Bitch, a murderer, but then murderers weren’t exactly uncommon nowadays. Weepers were technically still alive, and despite that, they still were killed on sight if seen beyond the Graveyard. She wasn’t particularly good at the job, had none of the traits a bartender needed, but then she wasn’t really a bartender, more of an overseer. She handled the supplies, the water, though not all of the food, not after the last time she’d used up a fair amount of the fish to feed a stray she’d taken in.

Pacing after her, Taylor hefted the MREs up, plopping the plastic bag on the counter. Rachel snagged it from her, hauled it off to the side, reaching down to gently scratch at one of her rottweilers when the dog in question tried nosing at her hip, his butt wiggling back and forth, a stubby, scabbed tail wiggling right alongside it. “This’ll do for a week,” Rachel commented gruffly, plucking the MREs out one by one and filing them away into the trunk they used for storage, the locks keeping anyone but the two of them out. “More than usual. Did you get first aid?”

“No, they had none to spare us,” Taylor replied, coaxing her soaked jacket off of her body. Her costume was just that, mostly, her mask and her jacket. The jacket had been her dad’s, and for a while it had been more of a comfort than a practical thing. Then, it had stopped smelling like him, and it had served no other purpose than to hide her weapons, hide her rats, hide her skinny, wiry frame.

Briefly reaching down to fish her box cutter out of the larger side pocket, Taylor coaxed the five rats she’d hidden beneath it onto her soaked shirt, the claws digging a bit into her skin, not that she minded.

Rachel grunted, it was an unimpressed, almost hostile noise. “Liars,” she said, after a moment.

“They are,” Taylor agreed, quietly, glancing towards the stairs. Her room was on the third floor, she was so close to her bed, to silence and isolation and a place she could finally let the mask drop, finally be something other than Scurry.

Rachel caught her eye, grunted again. “Go ahead,” she said after another moment. “I’ll feed the kids who weren’t down for dinner.”

It was worrying when Rachel could pick up on her exhaustion, on the bone-deep weariness. Obligingly, though, Taylor tilted her head down in a nod, passed by a few of the kids on her way through, who waved happily at her. To them, she was still what they imagined capes to be, the big posters, the spotlight, the cool powers and neat tricks. Most of them had seen her teleport, seen her dodge things that to them moved at speeds far beyond the human eye, but had, to her, with the help of her other power, moved achingly slow. They saw her as a hero, saw her like Legend, idolized her.

It was so _tiring_.

The first flight of stairs wasn’t so bad. The walls were thin above, the rooms creaky, she could hear a few people moaning in one room and let herself ignore the sounds, climbing higher. The second floor had her knees wobble, nearly made her topple, and the third floor was the worst. She felt like she was coming undone, like all that energy was leaking out to her, and she just about crawled her way to her room at the far end of the hallway, using the wall to support herself. Nobody really lived up here beside herself and Rachel, Rachel having taken up the majority of two rooms to house her dogs, with an extra one for herself.

Finally reaching her door, Taylor fished the key out of her soaked jeans, shaky fingers pressing it into the opening and twisting, the lock clicking open. Dropping the key back into her pants, she pushed the door open, stepping through and into her room. It wasn’t much - no rooms were - but she had made do with what they had. Fairy lights had been strung up around the perimeter to substitute for a working overhead light, she had a single window, and the room itself was about the size of her former house’s living room. Her bed was more a mattress, with a sheet stretched over its surface and shoved up against one corner, while another door near it led into an on-suite bathroom. A vanity had been hauled into the room far before she had come to inhabit it, and it now doubled as a desk, the half-finished second version of her mask left almost in pieces, not enough resources to finish it. She’d have to go scavenging tomorrow.

Reaching up, Taylor pressed the fingers into the gaps where her mask met her face, ran the pad of her index finger over the little clockwork buttons built into it. The mask peeled away, fell into her hands, and she took in a sharp, warbling gasp of breath, stumbling back until her spine caught against the sharp corner of her door. Shakily, she reached behind her, pushed the door shut and locked it with a twist, her other hand holding her mask in a stranglehold.

Walking over to the vanity, Taylor gently placed her mask down, stared at herself in the mirror. She still had her black curls, flowing down from the crown of her head, spooling at her shoulders in bunches, and for all that it was still glossy, still surprisingly maintained, the rest of her wasn’t. Her eyes were hooded, purpled bags beneath each of them, and the skin of her face was pale, her cheekbones too high, almost gaunt from the lack of food. Her lips were thin and chapped, a crack down the center of her bottom lip bubbling with blood as she opened her mouth a little, her tongue flicking out to catch the taste of copper.

She looked tired, dead on her feet. She felt it, too.

It had been two months since Leviathan, since four members of the Slaughterhouse 9 had pretended to be civilians in her shelter, had their disguises fail on them when she and three others triggered. It had been two months since the civilians in the shelter, in a panic, had rushed the four semi-unconscious capes, had killed Jack Slash, Cherish, Shatterbird and Bonesaw, the fourth of which, upon her death, released a virulent plague that had added insult to Endbringer and left Brockton quarantined, had earned Brockton Bay the title of Quarantine Site 8.

It had been two months since her father died, since the walls around Brockton had gone up, since tallboys and the walls of light had been placed to cut off parts of the city, had corralled those who hadn’t been able to leave into the partially-flooded regions of the city, leaving large swathes of it completely abandoned.

Taylor had a feeling it would be several more months before it was all over.

Stepping away, Taylor turned back to the room, watched as her rats continued to file in through the tiny gap she’d left open near her window. More than a hundred of them clustered in her room, her power reaching out to them, coaxing them into protecting her, into being calm and warm. They were mostly clustered around her bed, bodies tightly packed, a warm blanket. She found her legs moving without any thought behind it, carrying her step by step towards them, the swarm pulling apart, opening a space for her.

Her knees hit the mattress, the rats pulling in. Warm, soft bodies, none infected, all warm and all safe. She felt them crawl over her, nuzzle into her, felt herself relax bonelessly into the lumpy mattress that was her bed.

Then she felt nothing at all.

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh. Been a while. I've had some bottled up feelings about shit lately, and decided to write a snip. I kinda got back into Dishonored, but I might've overdone it. This is a crossover in name only, Taylor just basically has the basic skillset of Corvo with some exceptions, alongside some world setting stuff which makes Brockton Bay more like Dunwall than anyone really wants it to be.
> 
> MFGiaV updates tomorrow, as usual, but... uh. It might be a bit of a small chapter, this took a lot out of me considering I wrote it all in one sitting. My head hurts. I hope you enjoyed.


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